


What's in my pocket on this winter's day?

by Lobelia321



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-16 12:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lobelia321/pseuds/Lobelia321





	What's in my pocket on this winter's day?

Snippets of a story that might emerge (in the style of writing experiments). Or, how to get the long-dormant writing juices rustily humming into gear again and mix metaphors into the bargain.

Header. Just for the heck of it. Because I love Headers.

 **Working title:** What's in my pocket on this winter's day?  
 **Author** : Lobelia; [](http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/profile)[**lobelia321**](http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/)  
 **Fandom:** Orig.  
 **Characters:** Men with Old Testament names.  
 **Warning:** Adverbs. D.H. Lawrence. WIP.  
 **Category:** Seems to be some sort of thriller so far. Possibly set in a fantasyverse? The future may reveal more.  
 **Rating:** Pre-slash. Some swearing. Mild peril. The taking of the Lord's name, Our Lady's name and a saint's name in vain.  
 **Length:** c.2,000.  
 **Feedback:** Is loved. Even if it's only one line. Or one word. Or one character, even.  
 **Dedication:** This one's for Shel [](http://sheldrake.livejournal.com/profile)[**sheldrake**](http://sheldrake.livejournal.com/) because she is teh awe when it comes to orig and writing experiments, plus I probably forgot her birthday.

 

Based on Arvon 15. + 16.10.09. 17.10.12

 

**• First person subjective point-of-view, homodiegetic narrator collapsed into one with the focalising character**

All I did was put my hand in my pocket. Is that a sin?

Okay, I will rephrase. I didn't put my hand in my pocket. But I did put it in a pocket. My pocket, someone else's pocket-- a pocket's a pocket, right?

Is it a sin to stick your hand in another's pocket? Sure, it's a sin to stick your hand into someone's pocket, let your fingers close around an object and pull that object out. That's stealing. I get it.

But that's not what I did.

First of all, there wasn't no object in that pocket. So all I did was slip my hand in, grope around, and pull my hand back out again.

Problem? None that I can see. Nothing found, nothing taken, nothing nicked.

Person didn't even notice. Did not notice. I repeat: nobody noticed.

Okay, I will rephrase. Somebody did notice, clearly. But not the person whose pocket it was. And what business of anybody else's is somebody's pocket?

If I put my hand in somebody's pocket and pull it back out again, and another somebody notices and thinks to hisself, 'that person put his hand into that other person's pocket and pulled it back out with no object in it', what sin is there in that?

And if that other person then comes running up at a trot and grabs me and grabs my hand, and then grabs the person with the pocket and wrestles that person to the ground, and yanks that person's bag away, and rifles through that person's _other_ pocket, and then there 's a huge hubbub and sirens and screams and people everywhere, and the object that wasn't there before suddenly falls to the ground and rolls around and is about to go down a drain--

\--and I pick it up--

is that a sin?

I don't think so, sir. I don't think so at all.

 

 

**• strictly externally focalised, that is, we see only appearances and don't know what the protagonists are thinking.**

A winter sun slanted its blank high rays onto the square. Thick clouds clung to the tops of the mountains but down in the valley, the rooftops and clock towers glinted with autumnal light. Pedestrians milled. The fountain plashed, its tinkling just audible behind the strains of the band.

The stranger in the trilby and belted trench coat slouched at the corner of Mill Lane and Three Mile High. His collar was turned up and his hands were deep in his pockets so it was impossible to see whether he wore gloves or not. There was no scarf around his neck.

The stranger stamped his feet. He looked left, then right, then squinted up at the clock tower. There was one place he didn't look, and that was behind him. He didn't appear to notice the trinket trader's hand sneaking towards his pocket.

Perhaps the trader intended to pick the stranger's pocket. Perhaps he intended nothing of the sort. Whatever his motives, the trader slipped his hand into the stranger's trench coat pocket at ten minutes past noon by the clock tower clock.

 

**• present, unpredicated**

Sunlight. No breath of wind. Bells tolling. Plash plash: the fountain.

Crowds. Stalls. Market tenders. "Better butter! Better butter!" "News galore!" "Discounts on all winter fruit!" "Tomorrow, not today!" "Sin is nigh!"

What? A commotion? Real? Or orchestrated?

Every week the same. "Better butter!" "Trinkets for you and yours!"

 

**• Telephone and dialogue**

"Where are you?"

"Can't talk. Listen."

"I'm not getting a tracking signal. Have you turned your tracker off?"

"There's been a change of plans."

"How far are you from the meet-up point?"

"I don't have it."

"What do you mean you don't have it?"

"Yet. I don't have it yet."

"What's that noise in the background? Where the hell are you?"

"There's been a complication. The... device."

"What? The what?"

"Just fucking listen. This may be an open line so just pay attention, will you? I don't know how much time I've... Someone else made away with the device."

"I see."

"Yes, do you get it now? Someone else got in there before me."

"I don't believe this. Who? One of ours?"

"I don't know. I'm pretty sure not."

"Jesus, Mary, Aloysius, and the Holy Trinity. Where are you now?"

"I've got to go."

"Do not hang up. Repeat, do not-- Give me some details here."

*Click*

"We'll draft new orders, a new plan. We'll make inquiries. Jerry? Jerimoth? Fuck!"

 

**• the subjective third person**

Operative Jerimoth Blade skirted the square, head down, handset in hand. He continued to press the phone to his ear even though he'd rung off. It made a good cover. He knew from experience. So he murmured a random dialogue into the receiver. Well, not quite random: it was Dialogue Number Four, rehearsed for just such an occasion. "The polygonal or the hexagonal rivets? What do you think? Well, if we want to have the job finished by Epiphany, we'll have to cut some corners, budget-wise. Polygons will last about a decade but only if we get the iron ones." The trick was to keep your voice even and boring. And then to match your movements to the voice.

You couldn't be _seen_ to be skirting, eyes darting hither and thither. In addition to Dialogue Four, Jerimoth employed other cover manoeuvres. He spent elaborate moments digging through his pocket, pulling out a cigarette wrap, untying the laces, picking a fag, pretending to search for a match, asking a passer-by for a light, stamping his feet -- busy body motions to detract from what was really going on.

Increment by increment, he made his way round the square. He made sure always to keep a wall at his back. The pockets with the cigarettes weren't his real pockets.

"Well, if you want alloy rivets, that's another story altogether. That could add another three, four weeks to the job right there."

He jostled someone, as if by mistake. Rule of the game: do not avoid being noticed. Just avoid being noticed in the wrong way.

"Sorry," he muttered.

"Sorry," the other guy muttered and continued to talk into this phone: "I recommend iron. They'll last for about ten years, give or take. Best in the business, as far as rivets go."

Shit.

Jerimoth stumbled. And not in a planned way. Which meant, not in a good way. Not planned was never good. He also shut up, half-way through a sentence about brass fixtures.

The other guy turned round.

"Ah," Jerimoth said. Quick, quick, Dialogue Five. "Flowers. Asters, phlox and winter daisies." He all but shouted this down the dead phone.

The other guy snapped his phone shut, shot him a look, hopped sideways and was lost in the crowd.

This was an all-too familiar trick. Jerimoth himself had this trick down pat: how to disappear in a crowd. And Dialogue Five? Possibly a mistake to pull out that one. If this other guy knew Dialogue Four, he'd as like know Five just as well.

Shit and double-shit. What hadn't he been told?

This was not turning out to be a good operation. He'd lost the mark, he'd lost the rogue thief, and now he'd lost what appeared to be a second operative.

What the hell: had Op Control been _spying_ on him?

And then his phone rang.

He stared at the number. He had never seen it before. He pressed 'receive'.

"You still interested in those rivets?" said a completely unfamiliar voice, not Control, not Op the First, and certainly not Bela Fivesmith.

"Rivets?" he stalled.

"Sunshine Hay, third house from the river. Meet me at next bell toll."

 

**• Magic object**

The trinket was made of a shiny metallic substance, possibly an alloy of some kind. Its lustre was like brass. Its heft was reassuring, the corners rounded, the edges smooth with age. It rolled like a marble across Monger Misham's palm. It was the size of a die, but it wasn't six-sided like most dice. In fact, at first Misham had trouble counting its sides until he held the rolling thing still and decided it was a dodecagon: twice six sides. Although he never could be sure: although the object was solid and smooth, it eluded precise description. Every time Misham touched his fingers to it, the angles and corners felt different.

It had a faint smell of magnets and rust.

 

**• In the style of Charles Webb's _The Graduate_**

"Can I sit down?"

"Go right ahead and be my guest." Op the Third smiled a thin smile and gestured at the bare dirt floor.

"Thanks. I'll sit where you're sitting." The mystery operative planted his feet hip-width apart and let his hands dangle loosely at his side. It was the mirror image of Op the Third's stance.

Op the Third shrugged. "Why don't we stand instead?"

He watched the mystery man's shoulders square up. The guy still held his phone in his left hand.

"So how are things," the guy said.

"They're fine." Op the Third looked past the guy, at the door that had been left to and at the strip of daylight between jamb and threshold.

It was silent for a beat of thoughts.

"You mind if I ask you a question?" Op the Third said.

"A question" the guy said. "Sure." He flexed his fingers and relaxed them again.

Op the Third lifted his right arm, pushed his sleeve back and bared his arm to the mystery man, wrist outwards to reveal his tattoo. He left his arm for a long, slow moment. He kept his eyes on the guy's gaze.

"Okay," the guy said, "I give in. Who are you?"

"Kish," Op the Third said.

"I don't mean your name," said the guy. "But what is your mission?"

Kish shook his sleeve and let his arm fall by his side. "There's time," he said.

The guy nodded and shifted the weight on his feet. He kept his eyes on Kish's hand and on the bulge in the pocket near Kish's hand. Then he looked up.

"I had unfinished business out there," he said.

"Good," Kish said.

They listened to the door tremble in its frame as a vehicle rumbled by outside. From the river came the calls of the ferrywomen.

The guy drummed his fingers against his trousers.

"The question is," said Kish, "can we help each other out?"

"What?"

"Maybe I'm the insurance for you, and maybe you're the insurance for me. Who knows what they're playing at. Right?"

"Don't you want to know who I am?"

"I'll call you Benny." Kish cracked a calculated smile. "If you'll call me Kish."

And with that he leaned over in one mountain tiger movement, slipped his hand into the guy's pocket and pulled out his phone.

 

**• In the style of D.H. Lawrence, 'The Fox'**

Still, the man who today called himself Kish held one elbow balanced in his left hand, he wiped his dry lips, frowned with his eyebrows, and looked at Jerry from underneath his eye lashes. Kish's desire to dissemble was so strong it unsettled young Jerry.

Jerry felt he could not make out the man Kish's expression in the dim room. He was a dark smudge within a shadow. And always his pupils glanced back into the light from the door, glinting with reflected winter, with unconscious restlessness.

Meanwhile, he held Jerry's phone and slid his fingers over the keys, smoothly and measuredly, in front of Jerry who would have loved nothing so much as a look, or a touch, or even the man Kish's phone in exchange. Also he now perched against the opposite wall, like a lanky vulture, and held the phone loosely, without apologising.

"Oh well," said Jerry, suddenly accommodating, "if you're intent on rifling through my phone, there's no good in me asking back for it."

"It's not your phone that I'm interested in." The man Kish's smile vanished. "It's the object that you took from me."

***  
To be continued...?

© Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.  
Written and uploaded in one fell swoop on 17 Oct. 2012.  
permalink on LJ: <http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/800620.html>  
permalink on AO3: <http://archiveofourown.org/works/539439>


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